


Ninety Seven Percent

by ohhtheperiphery



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 13:55:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohhtheperiphery/pseuds/ohhtheperiphery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She needs to know that the equation is true, that the numbers are sound and the results are solid.  Shaun needs the taste of her mouth, her lips cracked and that dark sweet cola taste, so engrained into the essence of her she might as well just fucking trademark it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ninety Seven Percent

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Blackout_.

I.

_a peripheral device:_

Here's the problem, and it is one of perspective: you aren't supposed to be here.

They say every seven years all of your cells have died and been replaced. Every second the neurological "you" is dead and replaced by another, lightning-speed synapses building and breaking endlessly in your brain. If this sounds like a non-sequitur, we'll just chalk it up to setting the scene, _in media res_. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. This isn't the beginning, but it is a beginning.

You've heard the stories, you know how it goes.

II.

_paracusia:_

He can't keep her in a jar although their name suggests otherwise, but some nights he thinks just a vial of blood would be nice. Even after the Rising they still teach kindergartners to share. But he was _stupid_ , after all; loyal, yes, but also stupid. Say jump and he jumps, say run and he runs, say pull the trigger save the day shoot her in the spine and he says _yes dear_.

Which is untrue, mostly, and unfair definitely, but the bitterness of it leaves behind a bite that doesn't so much sting as it does spark, lace up and through his chest. It's like coals in his blood, a heartache so literal he can feel it, firing up and down his arms. Somehow it still leaves his hands and feet cold, tingling shocked and numb even three weeks later.

There's fifty-two messages on his voicemail -- Jesus Christ, fifty-two, who the fuck even _leaves_ a message anymore -- and he doesn't even open his inbox. Number was in the low hundreds, last time he checked, whenever that was.

He has a list of ways to do it in his head but he doesn't write them down, same way they never did the only things that matter, maybe out of respect. If he writes them down then she'll know, and worse than being disapproving, she'll be sad.

He chokes back the overly sweet taste that doesn't belong on his tongue and tries not to think about making ghosts with irisless eyes sad. The shadow in his head stirs and says something, a murmur, an agreement or a consolation or anywhere in-between, but it doesn't matter. The blinds have been closed for as long as the hundreds of emails have been piling up, but it doesn't stop the pounding in his head. Which he takes as a comfort. The ghost doesn't have anything to say about that.

It's a short list primarily because the only entry is "bullet to the head." He may be broken, he may be losing his mind, he may have lost everything else already, but he isn't an _idiot_.

George might chuckle at that, or it might be the wind. The room, of course, is so still there's not even any AC. It was just a _theory_ , sheesh.

 _Check your messages_ , she says, his eyes are closed and it might just be the not-there-wind rubbing at his temples, smoke tendrils winding around the prime spots of tension there. PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY, his head shouts for no reason at all; it's just decided, you know, fuck it, might as well shout off random phrases to go with the random sparks of pain still lodging themselves at odd intervals inside his chest.

He wants to flat-out say no, but the word chokes on the back of his throat like the acidic burn of another swig of Coke. He doesn't say out loud the stuff about the list and the bullet to his brain and the Grecian ending to this particular fucked-up tragedy, because she might get sad. Of course, he doesn't need to say the things when she's already in his mind to begin with.

 _Check them_ , she says again, the command soft but firm and like a fucking idiot with a gun and a thinly veiled death wish he denies himself every morning, he'll agree. What she really means is _don't you dare_ , and it's already been verifiably proven that if she says jump he'll jump, if she says fall he'll go tumbling blind and helpless into the dark.

III.

_hypnagogia:_

He can't see her but he can feel her, he's figured that much out in the delirious run of days that swim together into weeks, into months. Nobody's been dumb enough to ask if he's okay in so long that he hasn't had to lie about it. He's almost sure if they asked him now it might not just be a lie.

It's easier with his eyes closed; that sounds shameful but it's not. It's defensive, psychological; maybe there's shame in going crazy, but Shaun thinks that's mostly an emotion based on external sources, and there's no one here to impose that kind of fucked-up guilt.

So if it's not about shame, it's about coping, and it's a mechanism as good as any. The dark is warm, too, the way bodies that aren't dead yet are. It's Shaun's hand, on himself, yes, and his own breath he can hear, sharp and heavy over the blackness behind his eyelids, but she's there like a presence, too, like fingertips ghosting over every inch of his skin, barely touching, almost a breath and at the same time not quite.

It isn't enough. He shudders with it, tries re-arranging himself blindly against the bed sheets, and just when it's starting to seem useless he _feels_. She's on him; not just a whisper, not just the wind, but something solid, moving, warm to the touch. He thinks the groan that rips out of him isn't quite human, but it's definitely something _alive_ , and that's half the battle.

 _Shaun_ , she whispers, and he can feel her lips, too, brushing against his ear.

He comes with a shudder that rocks through his whole body, like something ripped out of him. The aftermath is dizzying, smashing down from a high, everything sucked out of his body at once.

The feel of her hands on him is distant as he drifts off to sleep, disappearing in some distance he can't see or feel but knows with a chilling certainty is there.

IV.

_a memory:_

The results are conclusive; blood doesn't lie. He hadn't really expected to be biologically related to George, the Masons had always been adamant that they came from separate families, but he trusts them even less than he can _smile for the cameras_. And either way, George had wanted to know for certain. So much else was determined by that odd mixture of paranoia and blood content these days, what was another test, in the end?

"So," he says, wonders if he should feel relieved. He doesn't; he feels pretty much exactly the same way he did a week ago, and a month, and however long before that. It doesn't have a starting point, a patient zero of feelings. And whatever those feelings are, he doesn't have the judgement-tinted words to label them, either. The simplest way he can explain it is _adrenaline_ \-- a distracting rush, a raging white noise filtering in over the dull beat of his heart.

It was important to Georgia. Of course it was, it was about the _truth_ , with George that was all or nothing, that was quantifiable, verifiable, a math equation. And she wanted to know, to see in clear, stark data, what they were, what exactly it all added up to.

"Now we know," she says, as if on cue.

"Yeah," Shaun agrees. The sentiment may be a little empty, but it isn't when she leans forward. Her mouth on his is syrupy and sweet and he knows one hundred percent she'd hate that description, which is probably while he'll tell it to her later.

Shaun wonders if it changes anything, really. Now they know, but George still tastes the same, still feels the same, electric and safe on his skin, like a blanket in winter. He's never not going to want this, whatever it is, can't imagine a scenario in which he won't.

The results are conclusive; blood doesn't lie. Shaun's glad, but not for the things he thinks he's supposed to be. Just to have George here, like this, to know that's the way they belong, the way they'll always be.

V.

_a trick of the light:_

George is standing in front of him. It's partially true. The parts where it isn't -- the three percent and a dead body he shot through the brainstem -- those are the parts that make him feel sick to his stomach. But George is _standing in front of him_ , and she may have the eyes of his hallucinations, but it's been so long that even those eyes have started to feel like a truth. In the dim gray-blue of the tinted blinds and the hotel hum of the air, everything feels like that space between awake and asleep, where nothing and everything makes sense at the same time. It's as if all the secrets of the world are being whispered under his skin.

A dim voice in his head is wondering if he might not be full-blown schizophrenic by this point, and if he is what is he going to _do_ about it, but it's such a rational voice that it's _easy_ to drone out. Obviously Shaun Mason does not live in a rational world, and George is standing in front of him, saying that she both is and isn't herself, like she's urging him to understand something. Like this is a math equation, and she needs to lay all the pieces out just right, to be sure that they both understand whatever it is it adds up to.

She needs to know that the equation is true, that the numbers are sound and the results are solid. Shaun needs the taste of her mouth, her lips cracked and that dark sweet cola taste, so engrained into the essence of her she might as well just fucking trademark it.

This is a liminal space, which of course makes it dangerous, the way the zombies occupy the world between living and dead. They both know it, stretched out on the bed. George's head is tucked in against his shoulder as she catches up on the internet. They can't stay like this forever, by definition. But there's something real, here, now, and that's all that matters.

There is a dead girl in Shaun's head, a replica of her curled up along his side, not to mention the Georgia Mason disposed of somewhere by the CDC. That Georgia will never walk, talk, feel again, does not cannot will never know that she was resurrected, will never know this moment here, with Shaun. The George breathing against him knows the George he has always known, but that George doesn't know her.

Shaun is gone too, he thinks, maybe a little more defensively than he expected. There's a memory of himself that isn't coming back, shed effortlessly like a discarded skin; an untouchable, unextractable shell of a man he once was but never will be again.

 _Sounds like excuses_ , says a familiar voice, but when George looks up at him and smiles, it doesn't -- can't -- matter. Excuses are all he has, that and a wish so painful it hurts not to deny it fulfillment. The problem, after all, is only one of perspective. George isn't supposed to be here, but really when you get down to it, neither is Shaun.

Shaun Mason had died, or at least a version of him, over a year ago, in Sacramento. What has been walking in his place since then is something less than whole. Shaun has been filling in the cracks haphazardly with the memory of his sister, making himself out to be the vessel to the echo of her voice. With this George, ninety-seven or a hundred percent or two, maybe they could finally piece her back together. Find the places where she was still and also where she wasn't, make something real out of the tattered shells, the lifeless things walking that still somehow remained.


End file.
